Social scientists find many questions about values and lifestyle that have no obvious connection to politics can be used to predict a person’s ideology. Even a decision as trivial as which browser you’re using to read this article is imbued with clues about your personality. Are you on a Mac or PC? Did you use the default program that came with the computer or install a new one?
In the following interactive, we put together 12 questions that have a statistical correlation to a person’s political leanings, even if the questions themselves are seemingly apolitical. At the end of this (completely anonymous) quiz, we’ll use your responses to guess your politics.
SOURCE: Personality Quiz: Can TIME Guess Your Politics? | TIME.com.
Here is an interesting article that asks you twelve questions seemingly unrelated to politics but will attempt to guess your political leanings. You might want to try it out to see where you fit.
This article starts out a series of posts about what makes a person conservative or progressive. I know I have sworn off the vitriol politics of Washington but this is a different matter. It is widely acknowledged that our country is pretty much split down the middle by the conservative/progressive feelings. I am currently in a study of trying to discover the different views of what it means to be in these two categories and how did each of us get into the mindset we are in.
Soon you will be seeing some more news articles about this topic here at RJsCorner. I am also reading a book entitled The Great Debate by Yuval Levin. Mr. Levin attempts to go back in history to try to discover where the sources of the conservative/progressive divide started in this country. He has decided that the debates between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine soon after our country’s founding is where the divide started. In the forward to this book the author states up front that he is on the conservative side in the debate. I am just now starting this book and trying to keep an open mind about what he proposes but still have to be aware of the political leanings of the author. This will be an interesting study of why we might be so divided today.
Getting back to the topic about Time guessing your politics, My results of the questions are shown on the right. I came out as a moderate leaning slightly liberal. I really consider myself more liberal than conservative. My score leans that way but not as far as I imagine myself to be. But as always I suspect that this divide is more complicated than a single twelve question survey can cope with. More on this topic in coming posts.
RJ's Corner 
Mine was 25ish/75ish….liberal. Hit me pretty well. A Jesuit raised conservative is a questioning, debate minded liberal 🙂
LikeLike
Wow, 25/75 I wouldn’t have guessed. I too was brought up until at least the tender age of 13 under Jesuits and in a conservative household.
LikeLike
the more interesting thing was in the link from the Times article to the Jonathan Haidt article on Karma vs compassion. He thinks that in a truly just world we would try to balance the two, and he says that conservatives give them mild but equal weight while liberals are overwhelmingly for compassion. I think that says a lot about our divide. Did you read it? I think you would find it interesting. By the way I am 73% conservative.
LikeLike
Karma has a very broad meaning, depending on your reference. Yeah I read the article with a mixed reaction. Karma is primarily an Hindi/Buddhist thing but I suspect you are referring to the “you reap what you sew” version. To me karma and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Yes, bad choices in life lead to bad results but that does not mean that we are therefore exempt from offering compassion to that fallen individual.
Being a fairly serious student of the teachings of Jesus Christ I think he was made up overwhelmingly of compassion rather than karma, if you will. I hope I live my life the same in that regard. Several people I run into daily at the soup kitchen definitely brought problems onto themselves with their irresponsible actions but now they are trying to turn their lives around. Some fall back but some do succeed. I have compassion for them and especially for their efforts.
LikeLike